Articles about Messaging and Collaboration

According to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), network operators around the world lose around $38 billion annually to fraud and uncollected revenues. Currently the biggest threat to telecommunications service providers comes from loss of termination revenues.

Termination revenues come from when a network handles someone else’s call -- for example when someone on one network contacts someone on another -- or when you dial abroad. Telecommunications service providers naturally want to have a reward for handing on the call to the final recipient. Annual declines in revenue from termination in many countries are 10 percent or more.

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Microsoft has provided more details as to how it will be integrating Office 365 Groups into its enterprise-focused social network Yammer. On January 1, 2017, the Yammer Enterprise service tier will be discontinued, but the social network will remain available and will be integrated with Office 365 services in a number of ways.

Within Yammer itself, it will be possible for users to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents through Office Online. Users will also be able to move their work from Yammer to a shared OneNote notebook or to the Microsoft Planner Project Management tool.

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Classrooms could be a thing of the past by 2025, according to new research by Polycom. Its Education in 2025 -- Technology Innovation survey takes a closer look at education and technology and has some interesting takeaways. While almost two thirds (64 percent) of respondents believe students engage with content primarily in the classroom, just a quarter (25 percent) believe that will still be the case in ten years' time.

More than half (53 percent) of education professionals believe real-time video collaboration and mobile devices will be the number one way students will engage with content in 2025. At the moment, however, things should be much, much better than they are.

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Does the world need another messaging app? We’re not sure, but Google is giving us another one anyway, launching Google Allo for Android and iOS.

Key features include "Smart Reply", which analyses incoming messages and suggests appropriate responses you can send with a tap.

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Four months ago, Google announced two new communication apps: Duo, for video calling, and Allo, for traditional WhatsApp-style messaging. Duo arrived for Android and iOS a month ago, while Allo is available from today.

While Allo is a good looking app, it has some big privacy issues that users need to be aware of.

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Sunrise is dead, long live Sunrise! Once considered the best mobile calendar app to ever grace us with its presence, it got acquired by Microsoft and is now officially retired.

But Microsoft has taken its best features and reincarnated them into its Outlook app's calendar, and the general feeling is overall quite positive. The updated Outlook, which is available now, comes with a couple of changes. Interesting Calendars is one of the new features, which allows Outlook to connect with businesses, TV shows and similar.

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Subscriptions can generate a lot of revenue for developers, which is why we are seeing them in so many apps these days. And it is not just new titles that now involve regular payments, as subscriptions are making their way to existing apps as well.

This is now the case with CloudMagic, one of the best -- and my favorite -- cross-platform email apps. It just got an update that changes its name to Newton and adds a number of new, premium features. The latest extras are offered as a rather costly one-year subscription.

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Portugal, Barbados, Thailand. Where do your retirement dreams take place? And how would you feel if you could get halfway to that sun-kissed lifestyle while still working? With modern technology that dream lifestyle could be closer than you think.

If you live and/or work in London or any other large UK city, commuter gloom is a way of life. Crammed carriages are the norm and ticket prices are universally grudged -- and only ever seem to increase regardless of the service offered. Take a Brighton to London railway season ticket; depending on whether you’re happy to be restricted to Thameslink services or not, you’ll pay around £4-5K per year. That’s a lot of money -- just to get to the office.

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Business collaboration tools are increasingly essential in the enterprise, but they need to keep content secure, especially in professional services environments that handle sensitive client data.

Collaboration specialist Huddle is tackling this with the launch of its Unified Authentication Portal. Using a single sign on, this lets account managers apply policies across Huddle's web, desktop and mobile apps in one step, simplifying the process of keeping content secure.

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Skype for Business users have had a pretty rough time connecting with other platforms (like Cisco or Avaya), but that’s no longer the case as the Cisco Meeting Server gets released.

Cisco's new product will allow Skype for Business users to easily connect to users on other platforms by clicking a link. The company believes its product will completely reshape office collaboration, and the impact will be "huge".

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Salesforce is taking the fight to Alphabet and Microsoft with the $582 million acquisition of Quip, a document collaboration firm that competes with Alphabet’s Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office products.

The deal will be completed entirely in stock options and is Salesforce’ third acquisition in the last few months, following the £2.8 billion purchase of enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider Demandware and the acquisition of deep learning company MetaMind.

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Here’s an interesting finding: the number of downtime incidents, which prevent staff to work from their usual offices or access business-critical systems, has seen only a tiny drop -- five percent, compared to 2014. But the nature of these incidents has changed -- dramatically.

According to Sungard AS’s new report, communication-related failures have "jumped by a third" and now account for 25 percent of all total invocations. Consequently, communication issues have, for the first time ever, been named as the top reason UK business invoke recovery services.

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You may be surprised to read this, but, yes, Yahoo Messenger is still up and running. In fact, the longstanding service seems to be here to stay as it just received new desktop apps that should make Windows and Mac users happy.

Yahoo has launched the new clients to replace the "legacy" programs, which will no longer work after August 5. What you now get is a fresh design and a number of really nice features that add up to a user experience closer to Android, iOS, and the web.

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Google has its fingers in lots of messaging pies, and having added SMS support to Hangouts on Android, it wasn’t long before the merging of text and chat conversations was introduced. With the release of Hangouts 11, this changes.

With the new release, merged conversations are now gone -- SMS and chats are kept separate, but you won't lose anything -- perhaps in a bid to push people to its Messenger app to take care of texts. The same release also sees the addition of a long-awaited feature: the ability to send videos in a message.

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Facebook introduced support for bots in Messenger a few months back, and it did not take long to see big companies embracing this new opportunity to connect with their customers. Now Yahoo is joining this list with Finance, News, MonkeyPet, and Weather.

Finance, News, and Weather are self-explanatory, but for those wondering why MonkeyPet is also on the list Yahoo says that it is the answer to those of you who have been "longing for a pet monkey". Let's take a look at all four and see what they can do.

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